Theses
on the nature of human morality

By Alexander Eterman

Posted June 6, 2004

Morality is the historical
reincarnation of the rules
of mutual social assistance as
practiced by the
obsolete tribal system.
B. Gadunov

The
author of these lines is unlikely to die a natural death. There are things
whose deflation meets with severe and inevitable punishment. Then again, to a
true moralist no death is unnatural. Moreover, he is sure to find himself in
good company.

1

Let
us begin by stating that morality (let alone the things that are intuitively
held to be morality) is not a set of acts we define as honorable or moral,
and certainly not a theory that defines these acts. [1]
Even so-called moral behavior is at best a graphic illustration of
morality, one of its manifestations. We should keep in mind that even those
noble acts we consider as being purely altruistic -- the kind whose doers are
compared to Mother Teresa -- are time and again performed by scoundrels and
animals, too, yet -- justly, though not always for the right reasons -- we do not
call these acts moral. Why? Is it for the sole reason that scoundrels do not
count and animals are not blessed with intelligence? Perhaps. What is far more
important is this: in the most widely held view altruism is much more diverse
and extensive than morality, which does not in any way depend on the abilities
and experience of its bearers or on their material and spiritual habits. For
this reason alone morality can hardly be envisioned as divinely inspired,
eternal, absolute, and universal. Furthermore, if it were all that, it couldn't
really be practically serviceable.

There
is no doubt that morality is one of the functional spheres of our social
fabric, one that has a palpable practical application. Unfortunately, it is
this latter that usually gets all the attention. Yet when discussing morality,
it would be sensible to focus on the key concept -- that of so-called altruistic
motives. For example, is it true that any help given to the poor -- even unselfishly
-- involves moral considerations whose nature is still unclear to us? Hardly.
For centuries, the entire impoverished populace of Rome was fed at the state's
expense -- even when the imperial capital was prudently moved to the remote
Balkans, and the City became the hinterlands. This systematic philanthropy had
no moral rationale, but the rationale it did have was no less intriguing: it
represented a distinctive political and cultural tradition which subsequently
evolved into a deeply entrenched custom.

On
the other hand, it is an interesting question whether it is by accident that we
intuitively couple concepts like morality and honor. What can we say about the
moral image of Roland or Cid? What is akin to the readiness to fight a duel
over a sidelong glance or a dropped handkerchief? Is it the honorable behavior
of Albert Schweitzer -- or the mad capers of Don Quixote? Or does their kinship
lie on the moral, maternal side? The last is quite likely. It is no accident
that knighthood, while it seriously existed, described itself as noble and
gracious and all the rest as base; whichever way you look at it, a name does
have an impact on behavior. Those who buy noble titles today seem to think so.

Nevertheless,
morality is not a useless and obsolete toy, as it was depicted by some of the
last century's classic writers. On the contrary, it is one of the mainstays of
our social orientation -- in fact, a highly useful mechanism. Thus it is not
enough to say that morality is a historical concept -- meaning that it undergoes
changes with time -- for we ourselves change at a much more rapid and painful
pace. On the contrary, we consider morality as more stable than our social
fabric, and in an effort to defend it we frequently resort to arguments and
means that sound suspiciously moral.

What
is more, morality possesses remarkable qualities that imbue it with a
sentimental, otherworldly aura, making us view it, despite all logic and
experience, as all but the only tangible perfect abstraction, a living example
of a magically transcendent phenomenon devoid of any clear material value and
mechanism and needing none -- as if moral experience (the a priori concept of
good and evil) came first, and only later did morality begin to fulfill itself
by unfolding through history. Essentially, this is nothing but insipid social
creationism. Liberal thinkers persist in finding a utilitarian or historical
aspect in notions of good and evil (which they continue to view as the main
content of morality), believing them to be something akin to an unfolding of
the social cube, its emotionally two-dimensional projection -- but this is
usually as far as they go. Yet morality is a living phenomenon that cannot be
reduced to its external manifestations, just as economic activity of a company cannot
be reduced to the rate of its shares on the stock exchange. We should note that
indisputable evil can be moral while undeniable good can be amoral. The most
important thing here is not to get bogged down in terms. Furthermore, it would
seem that good and evil are at least partially relative, so that the context
must be firmly kept in mind at all times. The Talmud has a story about a
certain sage who sentenced his own son to death, knowing that he was innocent --
all for the sake of maintaining legal formalities. The conduct of this sage, a
Jewish Cato, was definitely highly moral, albeit disgraceful.

2

Even
those who fearlessly believe morality to be a natural, evolutionary phenomenon,
something akin to biological vision or economic relations, rarely take the main
question of what it is all about to its logical conclusion. Since the entire
set of social interactions is patently evolutionary, it is easy to mistakenly
credit morality with everything that takes place between humans without being
contingent on anything substantial, reflecting current customs as well
as generating emotional evaluations. Regrettably, this approach is
unproductive. Unless morality by definition is viewed as a mechanism for
evaluating events that unfold in front of us, then it is totally unclear within
the framework of this premise where morality came from and why it is held in
such esteem by society. This nominalistic premise transforms morality from a
functional phenomenon into a trivial label randomly attached to an amorphous
set of social phenomena that have nothing in common with each other (in the
spirit of Napoleon's aphorism), living yet not fighting together -- and most
importantly, into a construct void of any organizing or prognostic power. In a
similar vein, the term weather can be applied to anything that happens in the
atmosphere without trying to simultaneously understand the elements of relative
phenomenon, labeled ad hoc with a relative term. However -- using a
different school of thought -- weather may also be defined in functional terms,
leaving aside such intriguing atmospheric phenomena as pink dawns and
crocodile-shaped clouds, while paying extra attention to the wind speed and the
amount of precipitation. Then weather becomes a neat physical package whose parameters
can be successfully predicted -- or at the very least correlated -- by means of
differential equations. The question that must be asked is this: when
discussing morality, do we imply something definite, coherent, and substantial?
Are we looking for another innovation besides the linguistic -- or at least for
concreteness? Is it our intention to explain or predict anything?

I
sincerely hope that the answer is an earnest yes. To be sure, our task is and
will continue to be hampered by traditional terminology. Once we are fully
justified -- the language cannot be changed -- in referring to the actions of
Mother Teresa as moral, it is not only natural but probably even
accurate to add on the noun morality. For example: morality is a set of
behavioral patterns that guided the renowned nun and her ilk. Such a
straightforward approach is blatantly tautological, and probably downright
fallacious. It is not only that the same highly moral deeds may be inspired by
various reasons, including those that are morally irrelevant, the opposite is
also true: the same motives frequently produce morally ambiguous results. In
other words, an altruist who behaves in an amoral or simply obtuse manner will
almost inevitably make a mess of things.

Even
more importantly for us, functional morality -- as opposed to altruistic
behavior -- should obviously be collective. Indeed, let us imagine the moral
aspect of Robinson Crusoe's actions before he met Friday. Moral tree chopping,
moral house building, moral goat raising -- a patent absurdity. Then again, it
would not be difficult to put together a morality-emulation model -- the
quasi-model behavior of a solitary man on an uninhabited island -- but this
would be nothing more than a crude fabrication. Roughly the same means may be
used to emulate love. The mind of a solitary person has no place for morality --
save perhaps a reminiscence, a dream of morality as a kind of a dream of
society (or perhaps this is a mere flirting with God, one's cell mate).

Therefore
we should concern ourselves with classification, take a good look at examples.
Handing out cookies on the street is not a moral deed -- at best it is an exotic
act, an offshoot of altruism unassimilated by the collective mind, at worst a
publicity stunt. Helping an old lady cross the road is a far more fitting
example of an ideal moral act. Self-improvement usually has nothing in common
with morality, while returning a dropped bill to a hapless passer-by clearly
does. The fact that "anyone would have done the same" (at least in front of
witnesses) only goes to reinforce this thesis.

On
the other hand, it is obvious that morality (or even moral motivation) is not
precluded by an individual's amoral behavior. Putting oneself outside the
collective moral consensus is far from an easy task. On the contrary, amorality
may very well prove to be a manifestation of moral zeal. Certain Gnostic sects
declared daily amoral conduct to be a sanctified standard, either in an attempt
to eradicate amorality from this world through its active practice or simply
assuming a mirror effect in the moral relations between worlds: all that is
amoral down here is moral up there and vice versa. A truly boundless trust in
today's rules of morality! To the same extent, violating an ordinary law does
not eliminate that law in the offender's mind. On the other hand, laws meet
their natural end not only on an uninhabited island but also after crossing
state borders. In London bigamy is a crime, while in Riyadh it is the rule.
This begs the question of whether the power of British law over the respectable
Englishman evaporates the moment the latter disembarks at the Saudi
airport.

Be
that as it may, morality is one of the most fascinating evolutionary products
created by the human society and existing only within that society, one of the
most important mechanisms of our collective (rather than individual) behavior. [2]
It contains at least one distinctive element that is usually left outside the
framework of moralistic inquiry. Let us try to track it down.

3

There
is no doubt that society, having an evolutionary interest in ensuring that its
members behave in a reasonable manner, creates and legalizes dialectically
evolving stereotypes of desirable behavior. For society, it is important to
prevent its members from killing and robbing one another, to have them follow
the same cult, respect the elderly, fight for common causes, prefer their
compatriots to outsiders, protect the environment, and much more. Society only
survives to the extent that it manages to create effective tools for
encouraging its members (not with one hundred percent success, to be sure, but
evolution is satisfied with less) to consciously follow the desirable
stereotypes.

The
principal natural tool that serves society's collective needs from the moment
of its birth is the law, demarcating the initial domain of social
phenomena, a domain that is sacral in nature and functional in purpose. This
refers not only to the formally adopted tribal, state, or religious law, but
also to any rule that carries a punishment, inspiring fear in the offender and
thereby intimidating him into toeing the line. A law may be written or
unwritten, manmade or passed down by tradition -- in fact, it can be any or none
of these, as long as it inspires fear or wields a punishment.

In early societies practically
every sphere [3] of human
life -- let alone of collective life -- was ordained and tightly regimented.
Primitive society left practically no degree of freedom to the individual.
Freedom -- no matter how theoretical -- was a negative concept, viewed as akin to
deviant behavior (this should be easily understood by those from the former
Soviet Union, where any "deviation" was a crime), a departure from the true
path, associated with death, and realizable only outside society and at the
cost of renouncing the real and/or sacral protection it provided -- i.e. at the
cost of the individual's social and sacral death. To merely raise the issue of
freedom (specifically freedom from the law, the freedom to violate the law,
to deviate from the law) was the equivalent of blasphemy, of siding with evil,
undermining the fragile sacral edifice of the social habitat. Ignoring the law
was viewed by the tribal society as a refusal to contribute one's share to the
common cause, as an evasion of the vitally important collective mission, as a
patently useless and invariably punished apostasy that posed a threat not only
to society but to the entire world. A loyal individual needed no freedom in the
earliest totalitarian societies.[4]

In theory, the picture has not
changed in the case of ultra-Orthodox Jews, for example. Their entire life is in
principle ordained by Halacha; they view any action, no matter how
insignificant, as imbued with sacral meaning, so that it must be understood and
meticulously performed in full conformity to the letter of the law; on the
other hand, the law does not overlook the tiniest detail. Thus their life has
no place for freedom, not even for raising the issue of freedom. For the Jews
(or the Bushmen -- the Jews are not alone in this), striving for freedom
constitutes a sacrilege, tantamount to an attempt to overthrow the yoke of the
law! For the ultra-Orthodox Jew, any degree of freedom is a result of
oversight, weakness, disregard for the divine truths, as well as their
society's failure to foist the required sacral restrictions on its members. All
of this is possible only in a tribal society that is primitive in its
structure.

It should be stressed that the
degree of regimentation is a key structural feature of society. The amount of
natural, non-censured freedom allowed by society serves as the key indicator of
its evolutionary distance from the primitive tribal system. One hundred percent
regimentation is used only in the sacral structure of the tribal type -- no matter
whether it is an ancient society or one that has deteriorated into a tribal
state. We should keep in mind, however, that even in more advanced societies
any rigid social regulation has a sacral quality. Even where the language has
evolved to a sufficient degree, and numinous (I continue to be an admirer of
Jung's language) terminology seems incompatible with society's nature, rigid constants are still called -- and are -- "sacred cows."

Thus
in the course of its development -- or rather de-sanctification, or, what is
essentially the same, the liberalization of its norms -- the evolving society
gave birth to a fascinating phenomenon: the de-sanctification and abolition
of the law due its relative superfluity. This brings us to a crucial
conclusion: at some point the law ceases to be the sole, principal, and (most
importantly) most effective means of ensuring compliance with basic rules of
social interaction, losing some of its relevance as a result. The classical
mechanism of coercion through law and fear of punishment is replaced by a new
socio-psychological mechanism. It turns out that social habits hitherto
enforced by law are capable of sustaining themselves without the intervention
of the latter. In other words, most if not all members of an evolving society
are willing to comply with key social customs on a voluntary basis.

It
must be noted that in most instances the existence of the mechanism for
self-sustaining social norms does not result in the abolition of the laws that
actively safeguard those norms. Thus the fact that murder has long become
unacceptable and abominable did not lead to the annulment of severe punishment
for the murderer -- the violation of the rule "thou shalt not kill" is
considered too dramatic to rely exclusively on social psychology in this
matter. However, the law in the society we are familiar with is intended to
restrain only the "marginal" would-be murderer -- a psychopath or the
out-and-out vermin. It is not without reason that today virtually every
murderer or rapist undergoes psychological testing in order to understand his
irrational motives, as well as find out whether he is sane enough to bear
responsibility for his actions. Social mechanisms that prevent murder have long
been operating side by side with the law, and to a much better effect. Consider
the fact that the reason the overwhelming majority of people do not kill their
enemies is not their fear of retribution but because they regard murder as
physically repugnant or even impossible -- unless carried out in the heat of
passion. Abhorrence of murder saves far more lives today than the fear of
retribution! And yet this has not always been the case. A mere several hundred
years ago, murder per se did not particularly disturb the charming
D'Artagnan as he strolled around civilized Paris knocking off Richelieu's men
without batting an eye. Today, a musketeer brandishing a long sword would
appear as a savage to the average Parisian. In 99% of the social domain in
Paris there has long been no need for a law against murder, for it inspires the
Parisians with visceral abhorrence. The law retains its relevance solely due to
the remaining one percent. It should be noted, however, that not so long ago
this abhorrence only applied to certain members of society. Subsequently this moral
injunction acquired a universal nature, making it unthinkable to kill any human
(and for some any animal), though not to an equal degree.[5]

5

It is this mechanism of
unregulated, self-sustaining social norms that deserves the title of morality.
Let us try to give it an accurate and concise definition. Morality is a
socio-psychological mechanism motivating society members to obey social norms
and rules that are not regulated by law or that act independent of law.

It should be noted that the root
of morality, its line of descent, runs through society's assimilation and
acceptance of the norms set down by law, so that even if the law does not die
off completely it ceases to be essential on the macro-social level. Yet this is
only one aspect of the issue. The moral mechanism is fully capable of invention,
of creating new norms that are inherently moral or of extending old norms to
people or objects previously unaffected by them. This, in fact, represents its
main advantage over the law. Consider this: even today we are not overly
concerned by the terrible hunger in Africa, although we would never tolerate a
similar situation on our own turf -- even if the law did not demand it of us.
Yet a mere couple of centuries ago in Europe, the view of the plight of the
lower classes was roughly the same to as the genocide in Rwanda today; the only
aid to the poor came from a handful of individual benefactors who had been the
first to extend their class ideas of society to include other sectors of population.
In their eyes a humble pauper became part of the same social fabric they
belonged to -- a revolutionary innovation. It was different when members of
privileged social groups found themselves in dire straits -- their well-to-do
brethren supported them in a "natural" fashion.

Next social morality spread to
the entire population of Western Europe; yet it was not so long ago that Albert
Schweitzer and Mother Teresa were the only ones to pay humanitarian visits to
Africa or India, today's outsiders. Their choice was predetermined by the moral
mechanism we have outlined, the same one that once turned the murder of a
neighbor from a forbidden to an unacceptable act; they were merely among the
first to have extended the psychological boundary of their society to the Third
World. The expansion of social boundaries made it unacceptable for the majority
of Parisians to treat with indifference a person starving to death on Champs
Elysees or a public beating of a weaker person by a stronger. For the majority
of Europeans, the same applies to the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. This
should come as no surprise: the Europeans have finally come to embrace the
Yugoslavians as more or less their own, denizens of the same Europe that has
spread eastward and swallowed up the Balkans. We can see why these same
Europeans placidly tolerate the genocide in Chechnya -- the moral mechanism has
not yet persuaded them to adopt the Chechen as "their own."

We see a classical example of a
moral action in helping a man who falls down on the street and dislocates his
leg. There is no law that obliges one to help the victim up and take him home
or to the hospital (some countries, religions, and cultures do have statutes
that require one to help a sick person, but even there it is enough to simply
call the police or an ambulance). Nevertheless, the moral mechanism works like
a charm: sincerely concerned people rush to help the victim from every side, as
if by reflex. Make no mistake: what we are seeing is not a basic illustration
of the effect of the moral mechanism, but a typical instance of expanded moral
domain. The only primal force was probably the obligatory clan welfare,
resembling the military framework where the care for the wounded lies with the
System. In ancient Rome no one would have paid the slightest heed to a beggar
sprawled on the ground and calling for help. In today's Western society, aiding
the fallen is an entrenched moral norm.

5

Understanding the nature of the
moral mechanism enables us to give a reasonable answer to the following
question: How do we explain the invariable failure of any attempt to build a
modern society and economy based on the abolition or severe curtailment of
individual initiative? We should keep in mind that, formally at least, the
communist economy contains no insurmountable contradictions, so that generally
speaking it is quite capable of survival. Furthermore, as we know, it was
successfully launched on numerous occasions -- and yet the communist endeavors
inevitably came to a bitter end.

It was often pointed out that
banning individual initiative, curtailing property rights, centralizing
distribution of material good, and non-egotistic work motivation run contrary
to human nature. It is obvious, however, that this is a matter of a cultural,
i.e. transitory, contradiction -- for possessiveness is by no means an inborn
trait. It is sufficient to remember that mankind went through a long period of
primitive communism [6] and that
private property is a relatively recent invention. Thus it is appropriate to
offer a more modest explanation: individual initiative is a natural and
inevitable element of an advanced civilization, and all attempts to suppress it
are nothing but childish yearning for the anachronistic past.

Unfortunately this assertion --
whether true or not -- is superficial and explains nothing. In order to give it
substance we must determine why known civilizations are incapable of existing
on the basis of communist principles, at what stage in social evolution this
inconsistency went into effect, and most importantly, whether it is eternal --
in other words, how will the events unfold from now on? In short, we must
create a sound theory of the socio-psychological mechanism that drives economic
relationships.

In fact, the moral theory
provides us with a ready answer, and one that is not at all far-fetched. The
revolutionary essence of a communist economy consists of transferring the idea
of property from the regulated sphere to the moral one. This,
incidentally, marks the dramatic difference between modern and primitive
communist: in early antiquity private property was not even a social option,
and society did not expect any material altruism from its members. Since social
relations were rigidly and absolutely determined by sacral law, the problem of
choosing a system of economic behavior did not even arise. On the other hand,
today's communist is perfectly aware that the publicly owned cow or car could
very well belong to him, so that acceptance of their collective status entails
a personal sacrifice on his part. The question, thus, has to do with the nature
and scope of this sacrifice.

More often than not, economic
communism was introduced by means of a decree that nationalized the means of
production. As a rule, such a reform did not cause any essential problems.[7]
Therefore the law is quite capable of establishing new economic relations -- all
that remains is to prove their viability. It is here, unfortunately, that
society meets with failure.

As
we have already remarked, the modern communist system, unlike its ancient
counterpart, must compete with another, egotistic initiative both on the
psychological and the economic fronts. Today members of communist collectives
are expected to exhibit a consciously selfless work ethic, essentially
amounting to an economic altruism, while at least aware about the existence
(even if only in theory) of an egoistic alternative; at times the latter is
very real, entering into a direct confrontation with the altruistic impulse. It
is here that the problems begin: in practice, the amount of selfless
industriousness was invariable never enough. To be sure, the lack of diligence
may be counteracted by adopting coercive laws. Laws of this type (written or
unwritten, but equally binding) were frequently introduced in different
societies, yet they never solved the problem. The fact of the matter is that
the very idea of forced altruism (as opposed, in a way, to forced labor)
contains a serious inner contradiction. Exactly to the extent that economic
altruism is at odds with today's society, a law such as we have mentioned
proves futile -- forced altruism has no chance of taking root since it looks too
much like slavery! As for slavery, civilization has decided its fate long ago
and irrevocably, and on a competitive basis as well: had forced labor been
sufficiently productive, slavery would never have been abolished. All in all,
forcing people to work efficiently against their will is extremely hard
-- industriousness is far too intimate an entity.

Thus
the success of a communist economy boils down to people's willingness, or even
ability, to voluntarily display genuine industriousness in the framework
of a system that does not repay them with adequate individual rewards. Yet this
is nothing less than a moral problem as defined above! Let us rephrase
it: Is there a socio-psychological mechanism capable of motivating people in
today's society to diligently observe the rules of a communist economy without
the use of coercion? Unfortunately, we are forced to answer this question in the
negative: at the present time, there is no such mechanism.

As
a matter of fact, there are a number of indirect signs that clearly point
toward this conclusion. For a communist enterprise to be efficient and
competitive (in other words, where workers put as much effort into making it
succeed as they would into their own business), people must be willing to
devote themselves to their work regardless of rewards. It would be safe to
assume that a society with such a work ethic would be virtually free of theft,
so that if a person lost a wallet, there would be a 99% likelihood of his
getting it back, and unopened too. In other words, the concept of possession in
such a society should have shifted to the moral sphere, without any real
need for formal regulation.[8]
However, to this day this has not happened anywhere. What is more, most members
of all societies continue to view the material sphere as one that permits
discreet rapaciousness based on the time-tested motto "Whatever is not
forbidden is permitted." Society's present attitude to economic egoism is no
less positive than it was a century or two centuries ago; what is more, it has
remained virtually unchanged. In business, unfortunately, altruism is still
impossible, so it would be premature to give up the services of the bookkeeper
and the watchman. Simply put, the material sphere still requires directed
regulation, which is incompatible with the moral communist economic policy.
That is why communist economic entities are rapidly and ruthlessly eaten away by
the discrepancy between their moral appetites and society's incapacity to
function in a non-regulated manner in the economic sphere.

An
extremely interesting question is whether changes in this sphere are possible
in the foreseeable future. A serious discussion of this question would lead us
far afield; it should be noted, however, that there are considerable grounds
for cautious optimism. In recent centuries many crucial areas of social
behavior have gradually started to become non-regulated. At present, human life
and basic human rights need regulated protection to a far lesser degree than
earlier -- though they have quite a few economic aspects. In our opinion there
is a real chance for social and psychological change [9]
in the sufficiently near future which will make the attitude to property more
moderate than it is today, with material altruism becoming socially "passable"
as a result. It is quite possible that in such a society the basic material
relations between people will easily withstand being regulated by a moral
non-decreed mechanism. In such a case the communist economic system will once
again appear on the agenda, probably with better chances of success than it has
today.

6

We
would like to discuss, at least in passing, a crucial and relevant issue -- the
moral concept of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. It is of particular interest in the
context of the moral mechanism theory proposed above, due to the aforementioned
extremely regimented nature of the Jewish religion.

Judaism
has not only armed itself with practical commandments for every possible
situation, but also supplied theoretical grounds for their necessity. The
all-embracing concept of the world as an arena for man's worship of God
effectively rules out any intellectual or moral human autonomy. Man may
retain [10]
his freedom of choice, but he is in no way the measure of good and evil.
Even individual views on this issue are absolutely intolerable. Any
predetermined situation is evaluated beforehand by the collective -- by Halacha,
if you wish, expressing God's will and interpreted by the rabbis -- so that
every ultra-Orthodox Jew is instructed from outside, or simply knows beforehand
what is good and what is bad and how to act in any given case. All he has left,
therefore, is choose between obedience (to God, the rabbi, and the law) and
disobedience (to the same), the latter tantamount to transgression. This state
of complete legal predetermination eradicates all other spheres of human
autonomy, including the moral. In Judaism man does not decide what is good and
what is bad (even what is white and what is black), and even when he does not
know the right answer the most he can do is decide which way to turn. He is
forbidden to create morality or even to discuss moral issues, for listening to
the authorities does not constitute creativity and discussion, but rather choice
through obedience, so that in today's positivistic terms he can be simply
said to have no moral categories (or independent notions).

In
a society where the only available choice is between obedience and lawbreaking,
man is happily freed from the "mirage of conscience," as aptly observed by one
of the last century's totalitarian thinkers. Perhaps the original Jewish
paradigm for making moral decisions is the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham,
unlawful a priori (since it was forbidden by Jewish law itself), yet redefined
as a necessary, moral (ordained) act commanded by God. This paradigm removes
morality from human usage once and for all, returning it to Heaven. All in all,
"good" in Judaism is synonymous with "ordained," which essentially leaves no
room for "moral" in our sense of the word. In Judaism the moral non-regimented
mechanism is simply inapplicable. This state of moral affairs is perfectly
consistent with all the other elements of Judaism as a tribal religion, or, if
you will, a religion of the tribal period. In this, Judaism is far from alone.

7

These
factors acquire particular significance when we proceed to examine the attempts
made by liberal Orthodox Jews to manipulate those classical halachic
injunctions which they view as inconsistent with the social standards of today,
being downright amoral (by an apt definition, irreconcilable with the
non-regulated norms of the society they were brought up in) from the standpoint
of Western values. Their attitude is understandable: the prohibition against
returning lost goods to a gentile does not look too appealing in present-day
New York. However, it is precisely the tribal nature of Judaism that makes
these attempts ludicrous. The moral watershed runs along the boundary that
separates the tribe from a more advanced social unit. In a sense, morality is
synonymous with freedom. Since these reformers are still Orthodox, the world in
their eyes remains regulated, regimented, subservient to Halacha -- it has no
room for the freedom to decide, and thus for the moral mechanism. As a
consequence, the classical formulae cannot be repealed, retaining their sacred
status as God's living word; returning lost goods to a gentile, at least ideally
speaking, is an undesirable act.

One
may, however, take another road, one that does not disrupt the concept's unity:
to arrive at the required social rule through more or less legitimate
rabbinical methods, i.e. to authoritatively conclude that in our day and age,
given our weakness and so on, the classical amoral prohibition (as viewed by
the liberals, that is -- in the fundamentalist world, there is no morality or
amorality) must unfortunately be temporarily suspended. In other words, the
liberals, dissatisfied with Halacha, make use of the same Halacha to find
justification for returning lost goods to a gentile. For a time this may be
convenient for practical life, but it is totally inadequate from the moral
standpoint. Since the essence of morality is that it flourishes in the
non-regulated sphere, the obtained halachic permission is not even moral -- at
best, it envelops the conduct of a liberal Orthodox Jew in a light moral veil,
barely creating a veneer of a moral mechanism. Morality, whose essence lies
in replacing rather than revising the law, does not need legal sanction.

In
fact, this was perfectly clear to the classical halachic thinkers, the Talmudic
sages and the rishonim, who treated the few quasi-moral indulgences they
issued as precisely that -- a veneer. Maimonides, who simultaneously
prohibited the Jews from swindling gentiles, talking about them in positive
terms, and returning goods they had lost, sensibly pointed out [11]
that the moment the Jews win real power over the gentiles, or at least real
independence from them, all the indulgences concerning Jewish-gentile relations
will be abolished, while the principle of "for the sake of peaceful
coexistence" that provided the basis for these indulgences will
immediately evaporate. What is more, the Jews will not tolerate even the
temporary presence of the most righteous gentile on the territory they control.
There is no cruelty involved in this -- only the harsh tribal logic according to
which Judaism has no room for morality as social factor, as a factor of
social freedom, for the sacral law does not leave a single square
millimeter of the social domain unfilled with decrees.

Attempts
to inject morality into Judaism are nothing but coarse modernization, inspired
by ulterior motives, performed by people contaminated by alien -- usually
European -- intellectual values. In their essence, these attempts are
anti-Orthodox. The intellectual zeal of their instigators creates an outlandish
picture: the law they have revised (the law and only the law -- after all,
Orthodox Judaism, as well as all other Orthodox products of tribal mentality,
knows nothing else) permits the Jews to return goods lost by a gentile while
their suddenly awakened conscience pulls them to an ideal halachic time, a time
when Judaism rises in all its glory and a Jew is finally able to draw a free
breath, where there will be no indulgences either for the Jews or for the
gentiles. In other words, the Jew is returned in his sweet dreams and prayers
to a time when he will be allowed once again to not return the lost goods to a
gentile with a clear conscience.

[1] Let us leave
aside the question of what ethics is, for if ethics -- as people often claim --
is the theory of morality, we still have to begin by defining morality.

[2] Individual
behavior -- provided it even exists as such -- is driven by completely different
mechanisms. Yet what is individual behavior? A man raised outside society by
monkeys or wolves is hardly a man. Robinson Crusoe on his tropical island
incessantly reproduces a picture of the world learned previously in the British
human society, behaving in a strange, not fully comprehended domain without
people as if they are about to appear at any moment. To be sure, we can
define individual behavior as behavior that is atypical, having no collective
analogies and improvised by the individual, behavior that a priori has no
social relevance due to its uniqueness. Yet is such behavior possible? Does it
exist? And if it does exist, does it have any moral relevance? We are not about
to step into this quagmire: man rarely realizes the extent to which he is a
social animal. If he were not such an animal, he would not be able to realize
anything at all.

[3] Legends of
primitive freedom and blissful tribal communism are as fictitious as the tales
told by Russian Bolsheviks about the free socialist existence in Stalinist
Russia. Freedoms, alas, are won at the high price of introducing complexity
into social structures, including public production -- complexity that we
appropriately call liberalization. Simplicity is synonymous with rigid
constraints and severe punishment for any deviation from the letter of the law,
always an offense by definition.

[4] Continuing
the topic of the preceding footnote -- it is amazing to what extent the
primitive renunciation of freedom for the sake of global welfare resembles the
political system of Soviet Russia! Nor is it any wonder: in order to force the
people to voluntarily (a terrible oxymoron) give up freedom, the Bolsheviks had
to create a total, world embracing picture, and proclaim it sacred to
boot!

[5] One might
reasonably ask: what about the sanctioned murder committed in war? The answer
is very simple: unfortunately, the social framework of civilian life does not
apply to military reality. There, the division into "us" and "them" retains its
original freshness, so that the extermination of "them" is transformed from a
crime into a virtuous deed. But just try to harm one of "us" in war, especially
a superior -- and you will immediately experience the force of the law in its
early, unspoiled form. Admittedly, there do appear every so often peace-loving
heroes who confuse the civilian and the military worlds and try to apply
civilian social mechanisms developed by evolution to wartime. The results of
their endeavors are plain to see: the civilized armies of today strive to kill
only enemy soldiers, while sparing and even feeding innocent civilians. How
well they do it is another question.

[6] In fact,
this period makes up almost the entire nominal history of mankind.

[7] In several
instances, it was even introduced in a relatively peaceful manner, with the
consent of the members of communist collectives -- the Israeli kibbutzim are one
example. Yet what was involved in those cases was not expropriation of existing
assets, but rather creation of new and initially harmless economic entities.

[8] Communist
systems are well aware of this. No wonder they all declare as their primary
objective the cultivation of the so-called new man, imbued with
intrinsic altruistic values. The problem is that such a man cannot be
cultivated -- although one day he might naturally hatch forth from society.

[9] To begin
with, society will become sufficiently wealthy and organized to guarantee
members a decent standard of living; today even the richest countries cannot
make this claim.

[10] Actually he
retains nothing of the sort, but that is quite another matter.